


ghost of a stolen kiss

by sugarybowl



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2019-01-16 18:15:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12347952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sugarybowl/pseuds/sugarybowl
Summary: She draws dreams now.





	ghost of a stolen kiss

**Author's Note:**

> I... found something I wrote like five or six years ago and decided to post it without even looking at it. For the lolz, folks. I imagine it's angsty.

She sketches endlessly in a notepad. She mulls over the thought of going back to Paris, back to school and her old life. But it’s been a month of thinking these things over and all those thoughts have become doodles on the margins of her sketches.   
  
She draws dreams now. She thinks if she drew a building, a true building with walls and floors that stayed in place, she would only draw the dark grey expanse of a Parisian warehouse.   
  
She draws dreams now, filled with impossible staircases and impossible corridors and impossible people. Around the margins of her sketches beside her thoughts of normalcy are sets of eyes. They haunt her and frighten her, make her wonder if the eyes weren’t part of Cobb’s projected guilt after all, if maybe Mal was the ghost that plagued the thoughts of all dreamers.  
  
There is a letter tucked into the back of her notepad, a letter she is saving to enjoy with her coffee like a prized treat. In her life, communication has never been a problem in an endless string of phone calls and emails and text messages, all of which she’s cut off now. But no one she had ever known would ever take the time to write legibly (or at least make the attempt) on a crisp sheet, to fold it ever so precisely and mark her name so neatly on the outside of an envelope. So the pool of possible correspondents is limited and she knows who she hopes it’s from.   
  
She makes her way down from the hotel suite she’s made her home in lieu of taking two steps backwards into a life too monotonously solid for her.   
  
Beside her cup of coffee, her fingers itch to reach for the letter but the bottom of her third cup tells her that in truth she is afraid of what it might say. It might be a job offer or an inquiry after her well being, but what she knows with a certainty she’d thought she had lost is that it is not a love letter. With a sigh she rips the crisp white envelope open, rips open the realization that what she mistook for fear was actually a deeply rooted anxiety that Mal had been right.   
  
_“Do you know what it means to be a lover? Half of a whole?”_  
  
The letter is short, polite, and imbedded with the unshakeable feeling of deeper thoughts between its lines; an inked paper embodiment of Arthur.   
  
Was she doing alright? He was surprised to find she’d returned to Europe. Had she found work in Barcelona? Would she be returning to Paris? It’d been difficult to find her, even for him. Was she interested in another job? A much simpler one, he took care to point out. The point man, after all, sent his regards.  
  
The prospect of another job, an extraction this time, should put her mind off romanticism and existential troubles and the ghost of a stolen kiss. Just because it should, though, doesn’t mean it does.  
  
  
*~*~*  
  
He swears he can hear pacing on the other side of the door just before he knocks, but the thought flies out of his mind as Ariadne opens the door. The sight stops him cold. He recalls briefly the feeling of walking into someone’s home when they expect company and finding it clinically clean, as if no one truly lived there. In a sort of reverse situation the girl in front of him appears to have polished herself to the point of clinical sensuality. Her dress is short and decidedly difficult to move in and the way she stands betrays her discomfort in the deathtrap shoes she wears.  
  
“Arthur, come in,” she nods, and he relaxes at finding that the quick and inexplicable change was limited to her appearance; her voice is as sweet and curious as ever.  
  
“I see you’re getting ready to go out, I’ll be brief.”  
  
He barely contains a raised eyebrow when she blushes, “I wasn’t. Getting ready to go out, I mean.”  
  
“Oh, well I just thought,” he waves a vague hand at her new look.  
  
“I was only… some friends told me I should…”  
  
“It’s alright you don’t owe me any explanations,” he clears his throat, “about the job then.”  
  
“I’m in.”  
  
He can only half suppress a chuckle, “Ariadne I haven’t told you anything about it.”  
  
“I trust you.”  
  
They stand for a moment or maybe two before she shakes her head, “I’m sorry, I’m so rude. Sit down, please. Coffee?”  
  
He follows her into the kitchen and she closes her eyes while she faces the counter, she’d been hoping to get a break from her heels while she put on the coffee but he’s here now and suddenly the coffin-esque quality of her kitchen is of greater importance than ever before.  
  
“Can I help?”  
  
“No, no, I’m fine,” but really she should look into getting a fan in this pot hole of a kitchen, “not a difficult job, is it?”  
  
He laughs, “My offer or the coffee?”  
  
“Neither.”  
  
“Not difficult. But there’s always a risk.”  
  
She grins at the ambiguity, “Always the chance of getting burned.”  
  
“Always,” and it’s not the first time she’s seen his smile but it’s somewhat shocking at this distance, and suddenly it’s gone, “that’s why I need complete honesty from my team.”  
  
“Of course,” the scent of the coffee is just this side of burnt and she spins quickly to serve two cups and hide a ludicrous blush.  
  
“So are you going to explain the femme fatal look or is this something we’re going to ignore? I’ll never keep Eames in line, but I guess we can work around it.”  
  
He smiles and waits, watches the oddly adopted posture relax and chuckles as she yanks off the painful looking shoes.  
  
“It’s nothing,” she tries to smile as she hands him a cup, “a moment of madness.”  
  
“Talk to me.”  
  
She shakes her head, “I’m not sure what I was doing myself, actually.”  
  
He follows her as she heads back to the couch, “Aren’t you?”  
  
“I think,” she sighs, and the rest of her sentence is a blur of half mumbled words, “I think the general idea was to seduce you but I lost nerve at some point between my closet and the apartment door, and I really think you probably need another architect, preferably one who is sane.”  
  
When she finally rounds up the courage to look at him again she finds him serious, with that intense look he always got when he thought about something that worried him, “Mal. Am I right?”  
  
He took her silence as confirmation, “I wish you’d known Mal. She was… she was nothing like the twisted creation of Cobb’s guilt.”  
  
“She said,” Ariadne toyed with the hem of her dress, “said I’d never been a lover. Half of a whole. She’s right, I’ve never…”  
  
He shook his head before she could finish.  
  
“That doesn’t matter. That doesn’t make the things you create any less amazing,” his voice was suddenly full of something she couldn’t recognize, “it doesn’t mean you’re less than anyone, it doesn’t mean you’re any less… wonderful.”   
  
There was something outside of her or maybe from deep within herself that didn’t let her move. As he spoke they had gravitated towards each other and now his lips were so close that his whispers tickled her own, “And you don’t have to seduce me.”  
  
There’s something to be said for the shock of reality and suddenly his lips on hers are warm and urging and so very real that the wisp of their dreamed kiss is removed and replaced by the feeling.   
  
He feels her shiver under his touch and pulls away to see her blinking, dazed and beautiful, but she isn’t dazed for long.  
  
She pulls him back to her by the knot of his silver silk tie and there isn’t space between them for fears or doubts but only for the beginning of something natural and unexpected and the creation of a whole from two halves.


End file.
